As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to these users is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may vary with respect to the type of information handled; the methods for handling the information; the methods for processing, storing or communicating the information; the amount of information processed, stored, or communicated; and the speed and efficiency with which the information is processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include or comprise a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Designs for information handling systems, and servers in particular, are increasingly packing more CPUs (central processing units), DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules), HDDs (hard disk drives), I/O (input/output) adapters and other features into the same physical volume. Aside from the normal “Moore's Law” increase in performance and capacity, additional performance enhancements, via features such as multithreading and multi-core features, are allowing systems to run at much higher utilization of the hardware versus several years ago. Additionally, power consumption has become critical to customers, resulting in desire to run a system workload at the lowest possible power consumption.
Unfortunately, as the number and frequency of the computing elements increases, and the voltage rails and electrical loss budgets decrease, overall margins have been reduced to the point where there is little to no “guardband” to protect the hardware from component quality and system noise excursions. Overall link and core timing budgets are shrinking. The probability of a correctable or uncorrectable error is increasing with both frequency and number of components. Moreover, as system power to cool is reduced, component case and junction temperatures increase. While components are still run within their specified operating ranges, their switching speeds slow down (further pressuring timing margins) as they run hotter, and their long term reliability is negatively impacted. Thus, low margin concerns may include, among other things, thermal marginality, low voltage marginality, supplier board and/or connector electrical parameter marginality, and timing marginality issues.